


The Bewlay Brothers

by Laura JV (jacquez)



Series: A Non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-30
Updated: 2010-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 08:45:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquez/pseuds/Laura%20JV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John really likes killing people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bewlay Brothers

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Basingstoke](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Basingstoke/pseuds/Basingstoke) for the beta &amp; title, and ngaio for the Britpick.

John kills a man, eats dim sum with Sherlock Holmes, returns to his bare little room, and has a wank for the first time since the day before he was shot in Afghanistan. He feels alive; he can feel blood pounding in his veins and he thinks _we're two of a kind, Sherlock and me. We get off on death_. He's alone with four changes of clothes, two paperbacks, his dirty gun, and that thought.

The next day, he packs up his room and moves to Baker Street.

He isn't surprised when Sherlock opens the door before he touches the bell.

It's a little surprising -- he thinks it should be more -- when he gets abducted twice in the next few months, and more surprising when he realizes that having Sherlock rip explosives from his body is the most erotic thing that's happened to him in years. He's supposed to care about that, but finds that he doesn't, much.

He's fairly certain he's also supposed to care about the people he's killed.

He sleeps well, in his room at Baker Street. The dreams are quieter now than they'd been since he'd come home. The best one, the one that replaces the rattle of machine guns, contains only the report of his own weapon, the shattering of a pane of glass. There is a purity to it, the way there had been that night: the knife-edge of reaction, of the cold calm flooding through him as he raised his gun and sighted.

He feels as if a dam broke when he fired that shot, and he is human again. Anger and fear and lust are back; he can feel things other than apathy and tremula. He wakes from the dreams feeling alive, feeling almost as he had before the war. He does the shopping, tidies up, and enjoys the odd romp after a dangerous criminal. His shoulder hurts and sometimes there's a twinge in his leg, but he can almost forget. It would be marvelous, if only the work were steady. Not the job at the surgery, the surgery is -- it's the surgery. Sarah's sweet and the patients non-emergent and -- it's the surgery. It pays for a few luxuries he couldn't otherwise afford, is what it does. Sherlock's work, though, the work that feels like living again, comes and goes. John used to relish idle time; used to look forward to doing nothing; now idleness brings with it the sensation of lead on his chest, of his heart slowing and bones turning to stone, so heavy he can barely move his limbs.

If Sherlock sometimes doesn't talk for days on end, well then, neither does John.

In July, Sherlock conducts an experiment on the kitchen table that shatters the glass fronts on the upper cabinets, and John punches him. They scuffle earnestly for several minutes, and John gets Sherlock in a chokehold; Mrs Hudson breaks them apart by hitting them with a broom. After she leaves them alone, Sherlock turns to him and says, "How did you do that? No one's managed to do that in fifteen years."

John tells him, because he can't do anything else; he's already learned he can't keep secrets from Sherlock. Two days later Sherlock takes a case, and then inflicts the same move on a criminal. He and John laugh about it, sitting next to each other on the sofa while _Top Gear_ explodes a caravan on TV. They put their feet up on the coffee table; John's boots tap against Sherlock's shoes.

Afterwards, Sherlock curls up to sleep, and John heads to St Bart's. He scavenges a fume hood from an old storage room, hides it in the horrid basement flat, and waits; it's a few days until Sherlock and Mrs Hudson are out long enough for him to install it and run the ventilation. He shifts the kitchen table under the hood, and builds a new table out of a discarded door and some stools he finds in a skip; on it he paints

  
FOOD ONLY  
NO EXPERIMENTS  
NO POISONS  
NO DISSECTIONS  


He might like to live dangerously but he isn't entirely mad. Not yet, he thinks, any rate. Sherlock comes home with a paper sack of body parts, reads the table, and says "You haven't explicitly forbidden me from putting human remains on the table. Interesting."

"Are they food?" John asks, and Sherlock smiles; he has a lovely smile that doesn't quite ever reach his eyes.

"Only if you haven't done the shopping. Otherwise, I suppose they do fall into the 'experiment' category." John points silently at the old table under the hood, and Sherlock moves the sack, still smiling. "Hunt up a spare fridge, will you?" he asks.

"I'll look on Freecycle," John says. "What's the experiment?"

Sherlock frowns and looks around. "Where are my tools?" John opens a cabinet and pulls out the box of handtools he's collected from around the flat. "Excellent." Sherlock takes a forearm from the sack and a coping saw from the box.

"The experiment?" John prompts.

"Osteoporosis," Sherlock says. "Cut marks." He begins to saw. "And come out with me, tonight."

John laughs and goes to make tea. "I'm busy," he says. But of course he's going; he knows it and Sherlock knows it.

He hums under his breath when he goes into work with a neat row of stitches on his temple and bruised hands. Sarah looks at him and says "Oh God, what was it this time?"

"You know how Sherlock loves a murder," he replies, and smiles. Smiling hurts but he doesn't care; he's reliving the crunch of orbital bone under his knuckles and when he closes his eyes, he can see spatters of blood, black under streetlamps.

"Did you get any sleep?" she asks.

"Five hours," he says. "And a nap beforehand."

"I suppose you're learning," she says. "Do us all a favor and have coffee at lunch."

He does.

Ella frowns when he comes in for his therapy. "What happened to you?"

He doesn't want to talk about it with Ella. "Altercation. With Sherlock."

"Rather a violent fight to have with your flatmate," she says, reaching towards his head, but not quite touching. He ducks away.

"Not like that. We were out together and got into a fight with someone."

"Who?"

"Just some wanker." He says it as if he and Sherlock had gone out to the pub and had a drunken row.

She writes "sexual sublimation?" on her notepad. This is why he doesn't want to talk to her about it. This, and because she would probably put him away. He wonders if what is happening to him is what Donovan meant by Sherlock getting off on crime.

"What do you find so interesting about Sherlock?" Ella asks.

"You've read my blog," he replies, because she left comments.

"Then you should have no problem telling me."

He shrugs. "I'm never bored around him." It's true, but it only goes so far. He's not going to talk about feeling human again, not with Ella; he's certainly not going to tell her that he hangs around Sherlock for the intermittent reward of killing people. If he was going to tell anyone about that, it would be Sherlock, but there's no point; Sherlock certainly already knows.

"How would you characterize your relationship with him?"

"Friendly. We're friends. It's good."

When he gets out of therapy, his phone beeps.

_Come home at once.  
SH_

Anticipation coils in his gut, low and hot, all the way home. Sherlock meets him just inside the door and hands him his gun. "Mustn't forget this," he says, watching John through narrowed eyes.

"No," John says, checking the clip. He tucks the gun into his waistband and covers it with his jacket, and Sherlock smiles.

"Compatriots of last night's murderer," Sherlock says. "Unpleasant fellows. Very upset with us. Shall we?"

John bows him out the door.

In the cab, he tallies it up. On average, he's killed someone every seven weeks since meeting Sherlock; they average two foot chases a week, and a really spectacular fight every three weeks. The rest of the time, the cases are quieter, even when the crimes are terribly violent.

Four hours later, he kneels on a man's back and snuggles the muzzle of his gun up against the skull. He sees a pulse jumping, jumping, underneath the ear; the man's lips move as he prays.

John does not shoot him. He would never shoot an unarmed person, a person he's already neutralized. He can taste blood in his mouth and feel blood rushing through him; it invigorates him and calms him. His hand and his voice are perfectly steady; he tells the man they are waiting for the police, and carefully swaps the gun out for his knuckle. "Don't move," he says, softly, digging his knuckle in; the man pants in fear, his ribcage pressing into John's legs.

John tucks the gun into his coat pocket with his other hand, seconds before the flashing lights of police cars light up both of their faces.

He stands, and finds Sherlock at his side, smiling slightly. "Well done, John," Sherlock says. He flicks his eyes up and down John's body, and John laughs; Sherlock manages to keep it together for a few seconds before he laughs, too. They hold onto each other's shoulders, laughing, while Donovan glares at them in disgust.

John desperately wants a shag, but he settles for Chinese takeaway. Sherlock licks red pork bun filling from the side of his hand, and John pelts him with prawn crackers until Sherlock cracks and smashes an entire bun into John's mouth violently enough to hurt.

When John finally heads to bed, just shy of two in the morning, he sleeps well.

Weeks pass, and Sherlock vacillates between frenzy and apathy. John's hand trembles.

Lestrade comes by. Sherlock, wearing only pyjama bottoms and a dressing gown, mocks him and vanishes into the kitchen. John hears his feet on the stairs; he must be going to his bedroom to dress. He looks at Lestrade. "You've got to start paying him," he says.

"What?"

"Paying. Him. He doesn't live on air, you know."

Lestrade crosses his arms. "How about I pay you, to wrangle him?" John raises his eyebrows, and Lestrade raises his chin, challengingly. "Fine. On these conditions. One, I end up with something we can actually prosecute. That means no payment for dead suspects, unusable evidence, all that stuff you two get up to. Two, you run as much of his interactions with other people as possible."

"Done," John says, before he thinks too much about it.

"I'll be outside in the car," Lestrade says, and leaves, slamming the door.

"Oh, John, John, John," says Sherlock, softly, leaning against the kitchen doorway. He must have crept down while Lestrade was talking. "Oh, John, you won't like that at _all_."

It is the only time Sherlock has ever spoken of it. John knots his left hand into a fist. "I'll live," he says. "Are we going?"

Sherlock hands him his jacket, and their shoulders brush all the way down the stairs.

 

\--  
end.

**Author's Note:**

> Note on the title: David Bowie has written a number of songs about mental illness, and most people think "The Bewlay Brothers" is one of them. It is possibly the least comprehensible song in his catalog. Basingstoke, upon reading an early draft of this story, said that it made the song run through her head; once she said that, I heard it, too. It's a peculiar song, and I'm not sure listening to it would cast any light on this story, but then again it might. -- L.


End file.
